Julia Vich-Bertran

Preliminary abstract: Twenty-five years after the transnational turn in migration studies, the contemporary global context calls for different analytic tools to apprehend how migrants’ transnational understandings and practices are now being challenged. As discourses of xenophobia, nationalism, and border protection permeate global politics and daily lives, children living transnational lives find themselves at the center of this right-wing turn in politics. The current situation not only reshapes their present but also transforms their future social/civic engagements. Despite growing academic interest, scholars still lack a cohesive perspective on what it means to ‘be’ a transnational child today. This two-day workshop tackles this challenge head-on by bringing together scholars who study different kinds of child transnational journeys that have been treated in isolation from one another, and by finding commonalities in how children live/construct their transnational social fields. Particularly, we focus on how children create relatedness, understand belonging, and experience governance in contemporary multicultural societies. We aim to comprehend how the new political contexts affect how children caught in transnational lives experience their situations. We will also contribute to new anthropological theory adequate to understanding the current dilemmas related to transnational childhoods. To that end, this workshop encourages empirically grounded papers focused on children’s subjectivities to make theoretical advances in the anthropological fields of childhood, transnationalism, and migration.